Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Baby knit her eyebrows in confusion. Then, as Lourdes released the abaya, she understood. A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, threatening to expose the gap between her teeth. “Ah! If only!” Baby said. “I wore this because he wanted me to keep it secret first. Now it’s the only thing fitting me. That’s the only reason. If he’s an Arab, then I’m rich!”

It was our turn to be confused, and Baby’s sloppy English didn’t help; the syntax almost taunted us. “He isn’t, then?” Rowena Cruz said weakly.

“If he’s an Arab, he can have a second wife,” said Baby. “They’re allowed, isn’t it?” This much she knew.

“I just don’t follow,” said Vilma Bustamante coldly. “The English you insist on speaking is difficult to understand.”

Baby smiled, and then obliged her, with simple words that no one could misread. “He’s a Catholic, like you. A kababayan. If he’s here, I’ll point to him. But you sent him out with the kids.”

She’d been saving up the news. That much was clear, as Baby threw her head back and let the coarse, full-throated cackle rip. “What did you think? While you were cooking in your kitchen, while you were shopping in the mall, while you were in the Philippines — where did you think he was?”

The stone walls echoed with her laughter. When she recovered, she stared ahead at the altar. We didn’t try to catch her eye just then, or ask who you and he were.

“I think you’d better leave,” said Luz Salonga.

Baby tilted her head, returning the soft, pitying gaze Luz had given her just minutes earlier. “This is not your house,” she said, and stayed where she was.

We marched past the pews, tearing down the ribbons and flowers. Baby stood in the nave like a statue as we stormed out of the Pillar. Even stranding her there didn’t satisfy us as it might have in the old days. She had her own car now, courtesy of a man who’d once drawn straws against driving her home. So she claimed.

Outside, we flung rice at Dolly and Bongbong and scolded the katulong. We felt they should have known. “A little warning,” said Dulce deLumen, “and we wouldn’t have let her ruin Dolly’s day.” We drove quickly to Paz Evora’s house to get the reception over with.

A faction of us dismissed the charges out of hand. Flor, for one, didn’t even mention it to Fidel Bautista. Driving away from the church, she remembered how Vic Ledesma and Pirmin Ocampo and her own husband had been punished for the simple favor of getting a katulong home. She didn’t believe this latest delusional claim for a second. Paz did tell Alfonso Evora, but not because she bought it. “How could Baby tell such trashy lies in church?” she whispered, as they opened their home to the guests. “After all the times we reached out and welcomed her! After all the help we offered.” Lourdes Ocampo and Rita Espiritu laughed it off with their husbands, the wave of Pirmin’s hand and the shake of Efren’s head erasing any doubts they might have briefly entertained.

Some of us, by the time Minus One began, couldn’t help but speculate. “If it’s true,” said Vilma Bustamante, “just for the sake of argument, if it was someone’s husband — whose?”

Maybe Domingo Cruz, said Dulce deLumen; Rowena could be oblivious sometimes.

Maybe Jose Zaldivar, said Luz Salonga; he only pretended to be so busy and so religious.

Not Efren Espiritu, said Rosario Ledesma. Rita would have his head or his something-else on a platter and he knew it.

Our husbands remained our allies, as we rated our friends’ marriages, proud of how our own stacked up.

But later, on the drive home, Baby’s words floated back to Dulce deLumen. Where did you think he was? By the time her children were dozing in the backseat, Vilma Bustamante thought of the Christmases and summers spent four thousand miles away from Ver, the spaces between aerograms, phone calls, sentimental cassettes she’d recorded of the children’s voices and mailed back to Bahrain. Pop music blasted from the foam Walkman ears on Luz Salonga’s daughter. Where would I be without you? Luz could hear, the lines of a love song turned sinister.

After she’d tucked in her little one, Fe questioned Jose Zaldivar, her brain tormented with the math of dates and alibis. “Absolutely not!” said her husband, slamming their bedroom door closed. “Good God. Never.”

Domingo Cruz turned off the bedside lamp beside a hysterical Rowena. “I won’t dignify this nonsense with an answer.”

For Rosario, no was enough. “She had me there for a second,” she said, kissing Vic Ledesma good night, sorry to have doubted him for even that long. But others couldn’t shake their suspicions. Dulce woke Nestor deLumen in the middle of the night in tears. “If this were true, which it is not,” said an exasperated Nestor, “could you blame us? Who decided that a wife and mother’s not a woman anymore? Would it kill you to wear a little perfume, make some effort?” Rico Salonga confessed to a horrified Luz that, although he’d been a faithful man, he didn’t see the big deal about mistresses, so long as wife and kids were well provided for. Vilma pulled it out of Ver Bustamante that several Christmases ago, while she and the children were in Manila, he’d consoled one of the katulong in their living room. “Minnie was homesick and couldn’t stop crying,” he said. An arm around her shoulders turned into a kiss, a shamefaced mutual apology, and nothing more. They’d recognized their one-time error and religiously avoided one another since. “As for this Baby,” Ver said (he was the one crying now), “I barely know what she looks like. Please believe me.”

We quarreled ourselves hoarse. Some of us grew so sure of a past betrayal we felt it like a poison in our gut. Fe demanded details on the fling Jose Zaldivar would not admit to: “When did it start? Last Christmas? On a night you drove her home? Did you do it here, in our bed? Just tell me if you’re still seeing her. Are there others?” Dulce accused Nestor deLumen of practical stupidities: “Ever hear of a condom? The Pill? What kind of idiot knocks another woman up, with everyone you’ve got depending on you, here and back home?” Luz banished Rico Salonga to the sofa. Vilma Bustamante threatened revenge. Rowena Cruz threatened to tell the children. Dulce deLumen even threatened divorce.

—

The heat had been rising through all of May, and for those of us who feared the worst, our simplest indoor chores — laundry, balancing the checkbook — felt no safer than minesweeping. Vilma Bustamante tiptoed through her own home, glancing over her shoulder, alert for lipstick stains and crumpled receipts. “Men stray,” said Dulce deLumen’s mother over the phone one night. “It’s a fact of nature.” What did we expect? That they could live on aerograms and cassettes alone?

Finally, Rowena Cruz led some of us — Dulce, Fe, Luz, and Vilma — in a march to Baby’s house. “Woman to woman, we’re begging you,” Rowena shouted at the window shades. “We haven’t eaten and we haven’t slept. Put us out of our misery, Baby, and tell us who did this.” We watched the door, like cops on a stakeout. Rowena of all people might have kicked it down, if it hadn’t given so easily on her push.

Inside we found the same thick carpets and sleek furniture that had greeted us in our own homes when we first arrived. We stepped carefully through the rooms, cringing when the floorboards creaked. The bathroom smelled of mint shampoo but contained none of Baby’s trademark trinkets or cosmetics. “Baby,” we called, finding a black abaya on the closet floor. “Baby?” we called, louder, as we traipsed through every room a second time, in case we’d missed her. After a while, we stopped expecting a response.